Critical Disagreement about Oedipus and Hamlet

Summary

‘The art of representation’, says Henry James in the Preface to Roderick Hudson, ‘bristles with questions the very terms of which are difficult to apply and appreciate.’ Questions of dramatic representation almost in variably involve the critic in attempts to apply and appreciate terms first used by Aristotle in the Poetics. Critical controversy about Aristotle’s exact meaning has tended to distract attention from the fact that, although his terms may not always be satisfactory, the questions that he asked are still important. In re-opening two old controversies I should like to try to demonstrate that there is a tradition of disagreement about certain passages in the Oedipus Tyrannus and in Hamlet. These disagreements are not simply an occupational hazard of criticism or further evidence of what Aldous Huxley has eloquently described as ‘the prevalence of folly, its monumental unchanging permanence, and its almost unvariable triumph over the forces of intelligence’. So far from belonging to the Dunciad Variorum these disagreements are relevant to our own concerns and are part of the evidence for believing, with Sir John Myres, that:

Criticism, in spite of popular misapprehension, is a progressive and constructive study, tending not only to the discipline of a liberal education, but in the strictest sense to the advancement of science.